D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Maxperson]

The reason why the lock pick attempt might be louder on a failed roll is very simple; it’s because one way to fail at lockpicking would be to make such a racket that you attract attention.

Being interrupted is not failing to be able to open the lock via the lockpicking skill. It's failing due to being interrupted which is different. If you want to add that into your personal game, that's fine, but it's not part of 5e RAW.

That you may not like this idea for some reason does not mean it makes no sense.

If it made sense, I would probably like it.

As it stands, though, you're adding something to the lockpicking skill that isn't written there. All that's written is the attempt to open the lock with the tools. Then succeeding or failing at that with the die roll.

But the players are making decisions in real time, why would the outcome of their decisions not also happen in real time?

Because RAW lets you pick a lock in 1 action, which means all it takes is 6 seconds or less for an attempt with no penalty to the roll.

Like, if I as a player have a choice between moving into the forest hex or into the hills hex, I expect that you as a GM need to know which I’ll choose so that you can then roll on the correct encounter table.

I rarely make a mistake here. The players let me know where they are heading and which route they want to take. It's pretty hard to go wrong, though on very rare occasions they do change it up for some reason or other.

If I, as player, choose to have my character spend time searching a room for a secret door, I expect that you as GM need to wait until I’ve done that to roll for a random encounter. How would you know I’d have the character search and therefore trigger the roll?

Searching doesn't trigger a roll. Time does.

Why would these things “already exist in the world” until made to exist in response to the characters’ actions?

Because some of us like sandboxes and/or living, breathing worlds. We don't wait and have the world and it's inhabitants spring into existence when the PCs show up.

Well, this is the standard way of doing it. You have your own way, and that’s fine… but it just makes your appeals to RAW for my suggestions but not yours stand out all the more.

"CHECKING FOR RANDOM ENCOUNTERS
You decide when a random encounter happens, or you roll. Consider checking for a random encounter once every hour, once every 4 to 8 hours, or once during the day and once during a long rest-whatever makes the most sense based on how active the area is. If you roll, do so with a d20. If the result is 18 or higher, a random encounter occurs. You then roll on an appropriate random encounter table to determine what the adventurers meet, rerolling if the die result doesn't make sense given the circumstances."

Show me where it says that you have to roll in the moment for those time intervals. I roll for the same exact time intervals that a DM rolling in the moment does.

I’ve not been comparing skilled vs. unskilled. It’s been about a skilled practitioner all along. That skilled practitioner may pick the lock quietly, or may do so unquietly, depending on the quality of their attempt.

Then it maker even less sense. A skilled person isn't going to make a lot of noise compared to a more skilled person. You are also I think mistaking what the die roll is for. The die roll doesn't represent the quality of the attempt. Meaning that a 5 isn't less quality than a 19. It's that the number represents the best attempt that PC can make being enough or not. A roll of 5 means that the best attempt isn't enough. A 19 plus modifiers represents the best attempt being enough.

An expert lockpicker isn't going to be putzy 25% of the time just because the die rolls low that often.

A successful roll means they were quiet… they succeeded. A failed roll means they were not quiet and drew some attention… they failed.

Not by RAW.

Well, rulings not rules is RAW, and that’s what this would be. Seems totally sensible for a DM to make this ruling given the circumstances.

I'm not saying you can't rule that way. I'm saying your homebrew isn't applicable in a discussion about the game rules.

No, you’re applying the term differently to different instances.

I don’t know what you mean by “applying the term to both sides of this discussion”.

I thought it was pretty self-evident. We're calling what we do quantum as well. Us quantum. You quantum. That's both sides.

And we aren't applying either as a criticism. We're saying that for us personally, one is okay and the other isn't.

 

[Enrahim]

Why do we need to go through all of that rigmarole?

We already have a roll. It already tells us something went wrong.

And, again, it's not like a single roll can't do two things. Failing a stealth check (VERY closely allied to a lock picking check!) absolutely does result in both the failure of the specific task AND, in many many cases, an immediate outbreak of hostilities or problems etc. So, again, why is it so gorram important that the die be thrown by the GM and not the player?

And just so you know, I literally already did argue that the way the VAST VAST VAST majority of locks work, they ARE pickable by almost anyone who knows how locks work. Unless it's a highly specialized weirdo lock (and thus the character never had a chance to pick it to begin with, which we've been explicitly and repeatedly told is not true) such that you need a very specific tool to open it, nearly every lock is eventually pickable by anyone who has learned how to pick locks. But they might be really slow or blazing fast. Thus, again, it is significantly more verisimilitudinous—as in it literally does have more similarity to what is true, it literally is more like what we can observe in reality—to say that a lock is only "unpickable" because attempting to take the time needed to pick it is too lengthy a process...which would be best demonstrated by having a danger appear that needs to be addressed.

Of course we don't need to go trough this rigmarole. That just happens to be a way many find produces a more believable experience than the proposed alternative.

And on that point: that real world locks generally are differentiated in how long it takes to break them is true. However games have tended to model them otherwise. So yes, those games are less realistic. But are they less believable to the general public?

And yes, believable is highly subjective.

(Stealth check example is severly flawed in that the thing after AND is typically an obviously causally linked event. Your example reads like "if you fail to jump a large gap your failed roll determines two things: that you fail to jump the gap AND that you fall into the gap")

 

[Enrahim]

Just to add to what @EzekielRaiden already posted in response to this: which RPG are you talking about, when you refer to a "well established game procedure"? I mean, classic D&D has those sorts of random encounter rolls. 4e D&D, by default, does not. Burning Wheel doesn't have them at all.

As far as I know, random encounters are optional in 5e D&D. There is nothing that says a 5e D&D GM should use random encounter rolls rather than "fail forward".

Which game doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't bind the GM to do otherwise. In which case, refer to your game rules.

Edit: "Well established game procedure" refers to that this is such a well known way of doing things, that I expect everyone still posting in this thread to be aware of it's existence and use. Your reply indicate you are no exception.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Quite agreed. "You simply cannot achieve what you want to achieve" requires much more in serious sim than just "you tried and couldn't do it earlier".

Social rolls, for example, are a common case where I would expect a "no retries without explanation" situation. When you've made an argument to someone, worked your wicked wiles, told a lie, whatever it might be...and it failed, just doing the same exact thing a second time isn't going to help. You need to come up with a genuinely new and distinct approach, nothing else will cut it.

But in general, yes. "You just can't attempt it again" is, in the generic, a gamist stance. It's just been adopted by a lot of sim players and....just sort of declared to be realistic even though that's not really how most "I attempted a task" situations work IRL. In theory, "take 10" and "take 20" rules are meant to address this, but those are also gamist workarounds to cover the fact that a binary-resolution skill system simply cannot account for the fact that most tasks are not a matter of pass-fail, but of speed, timing, and/or execution.

As I noted before, even a game with some pretty gamist chops--the Hero System--let's you try again. It just requires you to accumulate at least one bonus to success over the last try, which can be accumulated by simply by taking extra time. Admittedly, progressively more time to get more bonuses, but then, the bonuses also make you more likely to succeed.

I wonder if the schooling experience, where assignments are primarily graded on "did you succeed or not", ingrains into people the idea that this is how tasks generally work? Idle speculation, but still...I wonder.

Seems possible.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Of course we don't need to go trough this rigmarole. That just happens to be a way many find produces a more believable experience than the proposed alternative.

And on that point: that real world locks generally are differentiated in how long it takes to break them is true. However games have tended to model them otherwise. So yes, those games are less realistic. But are they less believable to the general public?

But realism, verisimilitude, etc. are the literal, explicit words used to describe this. Over and over and over and over. That it is not an artificial, abstract construct used to model things. That it is modeled, as closely as possible, on how things actually behave--and that if an abstraction can be replaced with something closer to the metal, as my programmer friends would say, then it always should be.

That's what that "new simulation" manifesto was all about!

And yes, believable is highly subjective.

And yet when I specifically said this--and, indeed, argued that different people see the exact same things as more or less verisimilitudinous--I know for a fact that multiple posters argued against me, quite hard in fact.

So, which is it? Is it believability, a highly subjective standard that depends on the feelings and preferences of the specific people at the table? Or is it the actual practice of resembling things that really are true, of being "realistic", etc.?

Because--as has happened so many times in this thread--as soon as something gets settled, uh oh, it gets upended again a hundred pages later when people decide that the things agreed to previously don't actually apply anymore and the ideas and concepts presented are in fact not that. At which point, any argument can be made, because we hear an argument based on "P is true" for a hundred pages, and then we skip a hundred, and then we hear an argument based on "P is obviously false".

It's hard to have any kind of meaningful conversation when bedrock concepts keep getting shifted back and forth and back and forth.

(Stealth check example is severly flawed in that the thing after AND is typically an obviously causally linked event. Your example reads like "if you fail to jump a large gap your failed roll determines two things: that you fail to jump the gap AND that you fall into the gap")

But failing a stealth check does not guarantee that you fall, does it? It simply means you were noticed. Being noticed is not the same as suddenly having guards swarm around you. Quite different, in fact. Guards certainly might do that. Or they might wait until they can catch you red-handed. Or they might not think they have enough people on hand, and wait until they get reinforcements. Or they might make a pretend show of force (because they know they don't have enough people on hand.) Or they might call for the actual police. Or maybe you weren't spotted by a guard, but instead by a scullery maid, who is fearful that if she raises the alarm you'll kill her. Or maybe you were spotted by a disloyal servant who wants their master to suffer. Or, or, or, or...

With the fall, there's one and only one situation. You fall. That's...literally the one and only possibility that can result from "you did not jump all the way to the other side". The two are physically equivalent. Now, perhaps the fall isn't what you think it is! Maybe someone casts feather fall on you after you start falling. Or maybe you get the chance to catch the cliff face. I'm sure I could come up with a list a mile long of "Or..." options--but the point is, by determining that you are not physically standing on(/clinging to/etc.) the other side of the ravine, you necessarily have determined that you are falling. There is not and cannot be any difference; physically equivalent.

"You were spotted" IS NOT physically equivalent to "guards are swarming you."

 

[clearstream]

Yes. I also think that many of those RPGers have not really grappled with the tension that arises - which I noted in my post - because X's veridical belief that Y entails that Y, even if Y is not an element, aspect, cause etc of X. Eg if Nero has a veridical belief that the slave traders user human ears for barter, then it follows that the slave traders use human ears for barter. Even though Nero is not an element, aspect or cause of this fact.

And this is not a trivial observation, nor a pedantic one. It underlies a number of recurring issues that arise in the play of RPGs. For instance,

*It explains why players have to ask the GM so many questions, in order to form veridical beliefs about their PC's surroundings which their PCs would form simply by looking around and listening;​

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*It explains why so much RPGing involves the players being strangers in a strange place, because that sort of set-up establishes at least a degree of congruence between the players' ignorance and the PCs' ignorance;​

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*It explains why Knowledge-type checks are a routine departure from the general principle adopted by simulationist-oriented RPGers that the causal direction at the table and the causal direction in the fiction must coincide;​

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It creates the possibility of "power struggles" between the players and the GM: for instance, the GM narrates the PC as failing to dodge and thus being hit in combat, but the player insists that *they are the one who controls their PC, and thus the GM can't narrate that they fail to dodge;​

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*Or another sort of power struggle: the player insists that their PC believes X, because PC beliefs are the province of the player; the GM insists that, nevertheless, X is false in the fiction, and thus the PC is wrong or deluded; the player refuses to play their PC as deluded, asserting that the PC's state of mind is their prerogative; etc. You might recognise this as one version of the "Smelly Chamberlain".​

If I was joining a RPG group, and the GM (or other group leader) explained that "the GM controls the world while the players control their PCs", as if that was self-evident and required no elaboration, I would be hesitant to join the group unless it was a pretty casual game, that I could play in pawn stance while maybe giving my PC a cool or funny name.

To which I would add the thought that play be considered unreasonable behaviour. And that it may not be the faults, but what is experienced in exchange that matters.

To attempt an analogy, an atheist might offer non-trivial, non-pedantic criticisms of transubstantiation that would not land for a Catholic holding the right commitments. Play as ritual requires doing the unreasonable, where the only justification may be the play itself. The devout could wonder why anyone would enter into their ritual without upholding its tenets? As to do so is to replace the experience.

 

[pemerton]

"If you don't have an agenda as GM that includes making the character lives' not boring you should not use fail forward."

This seems like sophistry to me. Who has an agenda that includes making the characters lives boring? No DM that I've ever heard of. It implies that using fail forward is how you make the characters' lives not boring.

Again, you are equating It is not the case that I have an agenda of making the characters' lives not boring with I have an agenda of making the character's lives boring. But they are not equivalent.

Make the players' characters' lives not boring is a particular component of the GMing principles for Apocalypse World. (Dungeon World doesn't have it; instead it has Fill the characters’ lives with adventure.) And "fail forward" is one important technique for achieving that agenda.

RPGing that rests on map-and-key type prep, or similar sandbox-y prep, seems to rest on a principle like Present the setting with fidelity to the preparation of it. This seems to inevitably run the risk of moments of boredom, for instance if the players - in having their PCs move across the map - don't find the stuff that interests them (eg because they fail to open a lock, and the consequence is simply that the lock remains unopened).

See, for instance:

You are asserting that there is a town entails there is a farrier. But this is not true. Some towns, at some times, don't have farriers, for any number of reasons: the farrier died, the former farrier died childless, the farrier ran off or was kidnapped, etc, etc.

All of which are incredibly unlikely. So unlikely to happen at the exact time the party gets there in a traditional game, as to not occur unless the DM has remembered the farrier and determined somehow that one of those things happened.

You're still thinking like a narrative DM where very unlikely things can happen if the DM thinks it interesting for it to happen.

This seems to me to be a clear illustration of you not having, as part of your agenda, Make the players' characters' lives not boring. Rather, you seem to be espousing a principle of fidelity to the prepared setting, along the lines of what I stated just above.

 

[pemerton]

I also acknowledge my mistakes. Nothing really is an absolute, so getting on folks for small departures from sim (which can themselves be explained as abstractions for ease of play) seems nitpicky to me.

Quite frankly, it reads to me like no one can do sim in @pemerton 's eyes unless they've mapped out every detail of their universe.

Of course, that's an absolute, so it's probably not true.

I think this is troublesome because you are treating "The GM controls the world, the player controls the PC" as an absolute with clear boundaries. But its more of a continuum. We can go on forever about if 574 or 575 or 576 grains makes a heap. But 10,000 grains probably is. 1 grain probably isn't.

Yes, in some cases in fixed world play, a player may exercise a minor amount of control over the world. A GM may exercise a minor amount of control over a PC. However, a player assigning meaning to runes probably crosses the line, while a player deciding their PC was an orphan as part of their backstory is probably fine.

(And let's be clear that 'two things are along a continuum' does not mean 'two things are the same', any more than red and blue light are.)

Here is my perspective on this:

I have done a lot of pretty hardcore simulationist RPGing. Mostly using RoleMaster, but also using RuneQuest and other BRP(esque) systems. My favourite current system, Burning Wheel, has PC sheets and combat resolution mechanics that could be straight out of one of these classic simulationist games.

And yet I get told again and again that I don't understand simulationism, that I am dismissive of simulationist priorities, etc.

Then when I ask some of those proponents of simulationism how they handle knowledge checks, or dodging in combat, and other stuff that (in various RPGs, and especially D&D) requires departure from simulationist methodologies, I get told that it's a "spectrum" and that I am unreasonably insisting on "100% sim".

The fact that it makes it seem that RM and RQ (and Burning Wheel?) are too much sim, while clearly Marvel Heroic RP is too little, leaving the conclusion that D&D in some non-4e incarnation is just right, seem a little gerrymandered.

Now if I've misunderstood, and that is not the conclusion, then I apologise. But in that case why can we not talk openly about techniques - eg about how knowledge checks work (their is a way they can cause issues in Burning Wheel; Marvel Heroic RP does not have the same problem, as best I can tell from reading, reflection and experience); about how asking and answering questions provides an alternative to them in Apocalypse World - rather than shutting those discussions down?

For instance, the dismissal of asking and answering questions on the basis that "the GM controls the world", only to learn that this doesn't mean that only the GM ever controls the world, seems more like dogmatic insistence than like discussion. What's the difference of method, after all, between what @Micah Sweet described upthread in relation to a player collaborating in relation to a PC's family, and a player in AW answering the GM's questions about their PC's life, memories, relationships, etc? I don't see any fundamental difference. Yet the latter is dismissed, while the former is accommodated under the banner of "no absolutes".

It has been stated several times in the thread.

I didn't grasp it when it was stated, and still don't.

You just object to the label 'quantum' being used to apply to method. That's fine...but don't assume everyone is using quantum as you do. People have explained that is not the case.

Yes. As @hawkeyefan said, "quantum" seems to mean the GM decides in relation to an external prompt in a way that I don't like.

If there's a different account to be given, I'm happy to hear it. But as I posted, I can't see what it is: that is, I am not seeing what narrating the farrier when prompted by a player and narrating a monster when prompted by a wandering monster roll have in common, that neither has in common with narrating a cook when prompted by a player's failed check, as far as "quantum-ness" is concerned.

 

[pemerton]

Which game doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't bind the GM to do otherwise. In which case, refer to your game rules.

Edit: "Well established game procedure" refers to that this is such a well known way of doing things, that I expect everyone still posting in this thread to be aware of it's existence and use. Your reply indicate you are no exception.

Here's another well-known game procedure: the Gm asks the player something about the world, and the player answers. I expect that everyone in this thread will be aware of it, given the repeated discussion of it (mostly by reference to John Harper's blog).

And here's another one: "fail forward", which everyone in this thread knows about.

I don't understand why, outside of the context of some particular game system or rules text, you're privileging one well-known procedure over another.

 

[FrogReaver]

"If you don't have an agenda as GM that includes making the character lives' not boring you should not use fail forward."

This seems like sophistry to me. Who has an agenda that includes making the characters lives boring? No DM that I've ever heard of. It implies that using fail forward is how you make the characters' lives not boring.

Taking the what should be the equally true contrapositive makes it more clear I think. ‘If you use fail forward you should have an agenda as the GM to make characters lives not boring.’

From a purely logic perspective I don’t have a problem with that statement. Humans sometimes add baggage where it shouldn’t be and so we are trained to some degree to spot that, except sometimes it will be a false positive, where we found baggage and there really wasn’t any intended. I suspect this is one of those cases.